Year in review: K-State has banner year

More than a century of frustration had built up for the Kansas State basketball and baseball teams, who played a combined 116 seasons without winning a conference championship.

In one year, the Wildcats were able to purge those demons.

K-State was the Big 12 regular season co-champion in basketball in the 2012-13 season, sharing first place with Kansas, for its first conference title in 36 years. The drought was more than twice as long for the Wildcats in baseball, who captured their first title in 80 years.

Coming on the heels of the Big 12 football title in the 2012 season, that gave K-State three championships in one academic year, a banner year and the No. 4 story on The Capital-Journal’s year-end countdown.

"To get a trophy and get to hang a banner is special," said coach Bruce Weber, who delivered the first basketball title since the 1977 Big Eight crown in his first season with the Wildcats. "K-State hasn’t done that in men’s basketball in 36 years and I’m happy that our team was able to end the streak. It’s been a gutsy season for our kids and I’m just really, really excited for our team, and in particular the seniors."

K-State became only the second school to win Big 12 titles in football, men’s basketball and baseball in the same season, matching the feat of Texas in 2005-06. Bill Snyder, Weber and Brad Hill all won Big 12 coach of the year honors.

"It’s a neat feeling," Hill, who won his second Big 12 baseball coach of the year award, said after a 6-5 victory over Oklahoma on May 17 clinched the title and the triple crown. "These kids kept talking about the example those people set in basketball and football. Those are great coaches and you try to keep your ear to the ground and hear what they are talking about to their teams. Our guys jumped on board with that and believed they could do it."

The Wildcat basketball team posted a 27-8 record, the second-most wins in school history, and made a fourth straight NCAA Tournament appearance after being picked fifth in the preseason poll. The "Bat Cats" won a school-record 45 games after a seventh-place prediction in the preseason poll, hosting and winning their first NCAA Regional before dropping a best-of-three Super Regional at Oregon State.

"We’re a bunch of nobodies and nobody expected anything from us," catcher Blair DeBord said. "We had a chip on our shoulder all year."

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